Traditional cinema halls in Jeypore town are on the course of a slow demise.
Gone are the days when people from the rural pockets used to throng cinema halls in droves in Jeypore town. Apart from marketing and dinning in the town during fairs and festivals, watching a cinema with family and friends was a top most agenda. In the cinema halls, tickets were available for all categories of people from the rich to the poor.
The most important feature was the trailer part, which was screened before the cinema was started. It always contained some informative news features that helped spread mass awareness among the viewers.
However, with various TV channels catering to the taste of several varieties of audience, now film halls have become a thing of the past.
In the process of modernisation, a few theatre halls have renovated to cater to the present trend of audience, but many got converted to auditorium for social functions and Kalyan Mandaps.
The laxmi Talkies in Jeypore town is inextricably linked with the socio-cultural life of the people here. After the Grand Cinema Hall in Cuttack, laxmi Talkies was built in 1968. It was inaugurated by late JC Nayak, the then Chairman of the Jeypore Municipality.
A controversy over the launching of the first film is still memorable. When invitation cards were distributed to play the release of a ‘Bhakta Prahallad’ a Telugu movie, students of Vikram Dev College led by the then secretary of the student union Suresh Dash protested and an Odia film ‘Dasyu Ratnakar’ was screened as per his demand. All he wanted was since it was the first movie to be screened in the first hall, the movie should be Odia.
Enterprisers like laxmi Narayana, Kella Arkeyya and Kella Rama Rao and Er Kella Narayana Rao took a pioneering role to keep pace with the requirement of the new generation audience. Renovations were made and seating arrangements were changed but nothing worked out and the approach from builders finally took the turn in demolishing the structure for construction of a residential complex. The old heritage hall is not to be found anymore.
Not only laxmi hall, the MKT talkies in the city has turned in to a function hall while another Srikrishna Talkies was shut down while the film hall made by the then Rajah Saheb late Bidyadhar Singh Deo, the former chairman of Jeypore Municipality, is now entangled in a property row.